Woman, Church and State…
An Early Feminist Indictment Of Christianity
[Religion]. Gage, Matilda Joslyn. Woman, Church and State: A Historical Account of the Status of Woman Through the Christian Ages: With Reminiscences of the Matriarchate. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1893.
8vo.; flowered endpapers; some pages, including half-title, lightly darkened; red cloth, stamped in gilt; covers faintly worn; else a handsome copy.
First edition of Gage’s 550-page critique of Christianity’s treatment of women; based, in part, on a speech she delivered to the 1878 convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association.
Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-98), activist, editor, and journalist, was born in New York to a leftist family—her home was a stop on the Underground Railway as well as a gathering place for reform-minded intellectuals. Gage first entered public life in 1852, when she gave a speech at the National Women’s Rights Convention at Syracuse, N.Y. In 1869 she became a founding member of the National Woman Suffrage Association and a regular contributor to suffrage newspapers, including Susan B. Anthony’s Revolution. Gage was an organizer of educational campaigns for women’s suffrage, and throughout the 1870s she worked assiduously on behalf of women’s legal and voting rights.
Interestingly, Gage’s focus on religion came about through her suffrage work: she began to identify the slow political progress of women’s suffrage efforts with men’s ingrained sense of female inferiority, an ideology men were exposed to mainly through church teachings. In 1890, in an attempt to combine pro-women and anti-religious impulses, Gage founded the Woman’s National Liberal Union, which combined a critique of social mores with advocacy of church-state separation. Three years later she published Woman, Church and State, her massive and influential attack on organized religion (in particular, Christianity) as a source of women’s oppression. In what was then a radical departure, Gage challenged the idea that Christianity has historically improved women’s lot:
It is impossible to write of the church without noticing its connection with the great systems of the world, during the course of life. The history of christendom is the history of myriad institutions which have arisen under its teachings, or that have been sustained by its approval...slavery and prostitution, persecution for heresy, the inquisition with its six hundred modes of torture, the oppression of science, the systematized betrayal of confiding innocence, the recognized and unrecognized polygamy of man, the denial to woman of a right to herself, her thought, her wages, her children, to a share in the government that rules her, to an equal part in religious institutions, all these and a myriad more are parts of what is known as Christian civilization. (p. 541)
Gage’s sharp critique of the treatment of women under Christianity preceded by nearly a hundred years Mary Daly’s equally influential tome Beyond God The Father, a hallmark of contemporary feminism.
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